Good Governance

With their beloved city manager Charlie Bush gone, a group of Sequim residents unites to fight the intrusion of partisan politics in their local government. They call themselves the Good Governance League and mount a campaign for an upcoming city election. Their plan? To get their own candidates into office, and to vote out the QAnon mayor. But it’s not easy. It turns out the mayor has allies. Will they succeed?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Sheena Younger was dismayed. Nobody wants a q and on, Mayor,
come on. It was early in Squim, Washington, and residents
like Sheina were waking up to the alarming possibility that
their local democracy might be in trouble. The mayor of
the town, William Armacost, had just told the city manager,

(00:24):
Charlie Bush, to resign just days after January six. This
was the same mayor who praised q and on a
baseless conspiracy theory linked to violence on live radio. He
called it a truth movement. After that, Sheina had publicly
called on the mayor to resign, but now with Bush's

(00:48):
aust the stakes were much higher. To Sheina, her town
was in the hands of a conspiracy theorist, so she
had to do something. A few days later, Sheina organized
a zoom call with a few of her friends, and
it quickly became clear that a lot of people in
Squim were just as worried, and China thought she could

(01:12):
channel that energy into something good. I felt so much
anger around me, and I'm perhaps I'm a little bit
of an EmPATH, but more more than a little bit,
I felt so much anger around me that I knew
that if if I didn't or somebody didn't organize a healthy,

(01:34):
positive flow of energy to get that out, it could
go the other way. That night, a coalition was born.
It was called the Squim Good Governance League, and it
was determined to prevent the town from falling further into
conspiracy theories and political chaos. Let it first by Sina

(01:56):
and later by other locals. The Good Governance League said
it so it's on an upcoming city council election in November.
The group wanted to get its own candidates into office,
candidates committed to working together and focusing on local issues,
and they wanted to take back power. My question was

(02:20):
how were they going to do it? And I mean
that very specifically. I wanted to know the nitty gritty
details of how Sheina and her fellow activists were going
to organize a movement around this idea of good governance.
You hear about petitions, phone banking, and postcard campaigns, but

(02:43):
what's the secret sauce for fighting extremism at the small
town level. Because it's not justin Swim, but the mid
term elections coming this fall, there are dozens of extremist
candidates running for office all over amre Pica and they're
already reshaping local life. You're listening to Bedrock USA, a

(03:08):
production of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio, a
podcast about political extremism, small town life, and the fight
for democracy. I'm your host, Laura Bliss. I first talked
to Shina in early right around the time she was

(03:30):
forming the Good Governance League. From then on we talked
fairly regularly, sometimes over the phone, other times by text
and occasionally on zoom. One time I got to meet
her in person when my producer Kathleen and I visited
Squim earlier this year. My ghost who is always case.

(03:52):
On a rainy night in February, we picked up the
heatas from a local Mexican restaurant and brought them over
to her house. Oh you guys can follow me, okay you.
Tina is a single mom and works as a recruiter
for a nearby hospital. She also pays pretty close attention
to local politics. She's even volunteered on campaigns for a

(04:14):
few county officials, but that's actually a fairly recent thing
for her. In the days before the controversy over the
Matt Clinic and the craziness with Mayor Armor cost. She'd
never really thought that much about her small town's city council.
It just was status quo, right our city camp. We
had a great mayor, did come to our chamber meetings

(04:35):
and was always out there at the ribbon cuttings, and
the stories in the paper were like the city approved
the budget, you know, and you just are like, great,
I live in a great city, and you just stop
paying attention. And all of a sudden, a hairdresser who's
a business owner is appointed to the city council and

(04:56):
you're thinking, oh, that's good. You know, I'd like to
see more business owners involved. I think their voice at
the table is really important. And so they appointed him mayor,
and within the next couple of meetings, he started, uh
speaking about himself as as your mayor, and uh just

(05:19):
some really odd things you heard all about those odd
things that got she in his attention, the Q and
on comments, punisher Scullpin and finally the ouster of Charlie Bush,
And that was really the last draw for Sina. She
knew Charlie from her time in Squim's Rotary Club and

(05:39):
various volunteer gigs. She thought he was the last person
who deserved to lose his job. Charlie was special. Charlie
was one of the top three city managers in all
of Washington State. There we we will never ever ever
get somebody like Charlie. So she started to organize. Like

(06:02):
I said, the first thing Sheina did was set up
a zoom call to talk about what locals could do. Next,
she created an event on Facebook and encouraged her friends
to join and spread the word, because even though it
was still a pandemic, at least people could come together online.
I was at my friend Nicole's house, who's also a

(06:23):
rotarian friend of mine. She was going to help me
take notes and all this stuff right, and we'll get
the zoom going, and all of a sudden, the numbers
are keep going up, up, up, up up, And I
look at Nicole and I'm like, oh my gosh, like
we could do something here, and she's like, what are
you thinking. And I had like so many notes that
I had written now based on like just a campaign experience.

(06:47):
It was just stuff. I think I still have that
piece of paper somewhere. It was just all of my
notes of all those things that we could do if
we had the people. And uh so, all of a sudden,
we had the people. More than a hundred people showed
up that first zoom call, Tina told me, and one
thing became really clear to her. People were furious about

(07:11):
the mayor's actions, and they were eager to express that anger.
But Gina knew that if they were ever going to
actually change anything about how their city functioned, the Good
Governance League had to not only be against something, they
had to be for something too, And so they wanted

(07:31):
to protest and protest the mayor and protest this. I said, Nope,
if you want to be participated in this, we're going
to rally. We're gonna rally for Charlie. Okay, we're gonna
show Charlie that this city is behind him, regardless of
what those four city councilors are going to do. The
hundreds are behind him. We're going to rally. And that's

(07:52):
what we did. We held a rally. There was a
really great turnout. Um In fact, one of my friends
he sent me really neat message and it said I
have not protested since nineteen sixty eight, and this was
my my entry back into that. And I couldn't have
asked for a better reason or had more fun doing it,
you know, so that was really neat. The Good Governance

(08:14):
League started out by being for Charlie Bush. Sheina even
circulated a petition for him to keep his job. It
didn't work, but their mission was bigger than Charlie. China
wanted the group to be a bulwark against anti democratic forces.
From there, she told me, it didn't take long for

(08:36):
the Good Governance League to get off the ground. It
was like the superpowers of Swim came together to fight.
People came out of retirement left and right to roll
up their sleeves. There was a local attorney who helped
fill out paperwork to set up a five oh one
C four. A former c p A who had moved

(08:57):
from Seattle stepped up to be treasurer. A librarian an
archivist who had retired from the Library of Congress volunteered
to do research. All of a sudden, I had the
best people from our community step up to take on
the roles. Organizers set up a website where they announced

(09:19):
monthly meetings all over Zoom, of course, and declared their
organization's mission. Their slogan went quote, good governance builds community,
Irresponsible governance divides community. And meanwhile, a consequential decision was
on the horizon, and that was who was going to

(09:39):
replace Charlie Bush. Sheina and the Good Governance League worried
that the city council, led by Mayor arm Acrost, would
hire someone ideologically aligned with them. The League put out
a press release calling on city council leaders to hold
off on finding a replacement, and after the election in November,

(10:02):
I talked to Shena over the phone. Around this time.
They are rushing it through as fast as they humanly can.
Um So it's very obvious that an agenda, you know.
So we're all just kind of keeping our eye and
not but the main focus right now for citizens and
the Good Governance League is to get folks elected, is

(10:25):
to right the ship. Gina knew that the stakes were
high for the future of Squim, but it was also
clear to her that the town had become, in some
ways like a microcosm of the US, because by this
point what was happening in Squim was happening in other

(10:46):
parts of the country too. By spring, Media Matters, a
liberal media watchdog group, found nineteen congressional candidates who espoused
qan on and who didn't anounced plans to run and
similar candidates. We're aiming for local offices as well. Dozens

(11:08):
of recently elected officials on school boards, city councils, and
local GOP committees had promoted parts of the baseless conspiracy
theory and that wasn't a coincidence. Prominent voices on the right.
We're telling followers, particularly Q and On followers, to get

(11:29):
involved in local government. More on that after a quick break.
So there's this gap, you know, and uh, this void
and Michael point store of steps in a bit and

(11:50):
like starts hammering home like run for you know, get
involved in local politics. He keeps hammering this one specific
line that is a local action equals national impact. He
keeps saying it again and again and again post and
Sidney Powell also says run for school board or get
involved with school boards. Um, you have Lynn Would, who
is also involved in those efforts, also saying the same.

(12:10):
And then over the following months you started seeing Q
and On influencers telling their followers did do this. That's
Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters for America,
a left leaning think tank that monitors right wing misinformation.
I called him up to better understand where the far

(12:31):
right's rushed into local government was coming from, because squim
seemed to be a precursor to something that had suddenly
gone national. Alex told me that after Trump's election loss,
followers of Q and on were like warriors in search
of a battle. Q, the anonymous poster who'd fueled the

(12:53):
conspiracy theory, had gone silent and online forums, so people
like Michael Flynn, Sydney Powell, and Lynn Wood, high profile
associates of the former president and conspiracy theorists themselves, stepped
in to fill the void. At conferences, on podcasts, and

(13:14):
on social media. They told Q and on followers that
they had a new mission to get involved in local politics, because,
as Michael Flynn kept saying, local action equals national impact.
That tagline that Michael Flynn said is what are we
like now on the side of like one of the

(13:36):
biggest chewan on forums on the internet. That message really resonated,
Alex said. Remember, Q and on started out as a
web of lies and scapegoats, and it's linked to serious
violence both on January six and in the personal lives
of some of its followers. And now Q and on

(13:57):
was starting to morph into something even her. Anti vaxers
started to glom on. So did election deniers, militia groups,
and white nationalists. To use Alex's phrase, Q and on
became a broad anti reality network, giving a boost to
other conspiracy theories and hate groups, and giving a boost

(14:21):
to extremist candidates running for office. I'm telling you this
because by the middle of SWIM was starting to look
like a bell weather and what was in store for
the rest of America. I spoke to Lindsay Schubner, the
program director for the Western State Center, a nonprofit focused

(14:43):
on social justice and civil rights. She told me that
this wave of extremism made groups like the Swim Good
Governance League all the more important to document and understand.
You know, I think despite all this, right, I think
it's really critical to recognize the incredibly vibrant field in

(15:06):
this country that has developed two support democracy. Right there,
There's a whole field of pro democracy communities and organizations,
and I think it's it's important to recognize that and
also to appreciate the the large coalitions of community groups
and elected officials and state workers and educators who are

(15:28):
really fighting every day to counter the threats that they're
receiving and take action to strengths and inclusive democracy. But
in Squim it wasn't going to be easy. Soon it
was summer of Around this time, she Na got busy
with personal stuff and stepped down as a leader of

(15:50):
the Good Governance League, but other volunteers took the group forward.
The next step was backing a slate of candidates for
the upcoming city council election. Hey, um miame's Marcia McGuire um.
Last name is M. A. G U I R. E.
Marcia is the retired librarian and archivist. I told you

(16:11):
about the one who once worked at the Library of Congress.
We talked on Zoom along with a couple of other
Good Governance League volunteers earlier this year. Marcia told me
she moved to Squim in two. Pretty soon after that
Trump got elected. Marcia, who was a Democrat, got involved

(16:32):
in the local chapter of Indivisible, the left wing grassroots
organizing network. For years, she attended anti Trump protests and
phone banked for progressive candidates in Washington State. Like Sheina,
she wasn't really paying attention to local politics when Mayor
arm Accost came into office, and I think it was

(16:54):
also because we we realized we were in this situation
because we had fallen asleep with the wheel. So Marcia
joined up with the Good Governance League, and when it
came time for the group to choose a slate of
candidates to support, it was clear to her that their
political party was not the most important thing. After all,

(17:15):
the positions on city council are supposed to be non partisan.
What they needed were people who are committed to solving
problems for Squim rather than winning ideological battles. The logical
thing was, yeah, we gotta get some good candidates to
support reasonable government and not one based on far right ideology.

(17:36):
One of the candidates that the Good Governance League endorsed
was Vicky Lowe, a lifelong Swim resident. She was a
descendant of both the Jamestown Skalmn tribe as well as
one of Squim's original white settler families. You actually heard
her in the last episode pleading to the city Council
to denounce the racism spewing on social media and sponsor

(18:00):
to the Matt Clinic. Vicky, who works as the executive
director of the American Indian Health Commission for Washington State,
had wanted a seat on city council for a long
time now she was throwing her hat into the ring
for the official election. Here she is at a Good
Governance League meeting in early talking about why she wanted

(18:24):
a seat at the table. But I think the piece
that's really messine is that helping human services side and
that part of our community that is maybe a little
more marginalized and needs to get a voice on our council.
And that's why I've applied. But Vicky and the other
candidates endorsed by the Good Governance League had competition because

(18:44):
another slate of candidates was also forming. They were all
affiliated with a man that Sina liked to call the
Roger Stone of Kalum County. His name was Donnie Hall,
and he was a strategist for the local Republican Party
and on the side, Donnie and one of his colleagues
helped train and coach first time candidates running for office

(19:08):
in Clellum County. He told me, we like working with novices,
true citizen candidates, even though the success ratio is pretty low.
We like doing that because we feel, you know, again,
closest to the people that way, and usually a novice,
a citizen candidates running, they've got a gripe from the

(19:30):
people's perspective, and usually we can sympathize with their gripe.
One of Donnie's early trainees was William Arma Coost, whom
he helps get elected when he ran unopposed for Swim
City Council. Donnie sympathized with Mayor arma Costs opposition to
the Matt Clinic, and he didn't see the mayor's support

(19:52):
for Q and On as a problem. He saw the
removal of Charlie Bush as justified because of how the
city he had handled the Matt Clinic and because he
thought Charlie had been disloyal to the mayor. In Donnie's view,
the Good Governance League's crusade to save Charlie Bush and

(20:12):
their fight to take back city council we're all part
of the political elitism that Donnie and his candidates wanted
to quash. This was a classic case of populism versus
the elite. The elite, in my opinion, they feel they
lost big when they lost the city manager, Charlie Bush.

(20:35):
Um That was never supposed to happen. They were happy
having a city manager who pretty much ran the city.
Um as sort of a pseudo mayor. Now, Donnie and
his colleagues were supporting five candidates for the upcoming election.
They included the three city council members who voted alongside

(20:57):
Mayor Armor Cost in favor of Charlie Bush's Austa, as
well as two new additional candidates, and to clarify, Arma
Cost himself was not up for reelection. Inside Save Our Squim,
the Facebook group that had formed to oppose the Matt Clinic,
members gave their endorsement to this group of candidates. Some

(21:20):
labeled the Good Governance League as the choice of communists
and socialists. Now, most of the candidates endorsed by the
Good Governance League, like Vicky, did, lean left in their
political views, but one of them had actually once worked
closely with Donnie Hall. That was Brandon Genese, a sitting

(21:42):
City council member who was running for re election in November.
Early on, Brandon had been a favorite amongst Save Our
Squim members. He was a Republican with pretty conservative views
on taxes and regulations. But Brandon switch sides, so to speak.

(22:02):
He was still a Republican, but no longer affiliated himself
with Donnie's group. He'd hitched his wagon to the Good
Governance League, and now he was on their list of
endorsed candidates. I wondered why, what made Brandon an example
of the kind of good governance this group was trying
to promote? As Sheena, and she told me I had

(22:27):
to look back at what Brandon had done the nightmare
arm Acost called for Charlie Bush's resignation. So for one
last time, I watched the video of that city council meeting.
Thank you for your patience. At this executive session, we
discussed the city manager, Charlie Bush. And as a result
of this discussion, I am prepared to make the following motion.

(22:51):
When the mayor called for a vote on his motion
to prepare for Charlie Bush's resignation. Brandon had been one
of the two city councilors to oppose it, but not
only that, right before the vote was taken, he very
publicly stood up for Charlie. And if we could do

(23:11):
a roll call vote, can make a statement real quick,
go ahead, um, Charlie. I don't agree with what's what's
going on here, and I'm sorry that you again put
through this. And that's all I gotta say. Watching this back.
I thought that was pretty brave. I imagined it couldn't
have been easy to go against the mayor, given the

(23:34):
strong pull towards extremism on the council. I wanted to
know what that was like for Brandon. So Kathleen and
I met City Councilor Brandon Genis at his home in Squim,
where he has a Yorkie named Bemo and a chicken

(23:56):
coop in the big backyard. He works at the county jail,
and he and his wife are foster parents. He's been
serving on city council since seen and told me his
passion for public service stems from his time serving in Iraq. Yeah.
It put a lot of things in perspective kind of thing.
A lot of it had to do with, you know,

(24:17):
opportunity in Iraq, um what what you know, it's an
war zone, their rebuilding, so there's not either the social
or the physical structure of their universities, things for kids
to do, kind of thing there that you would find.
Here's when you come back here and say, hey, you know,
we have all this resources and opportunities to do something

(24:38):
here that they don't there. Let's try to, you know,
figure out what we can do. Brandon told me he
joined the city council to work on things that matter
to Squim. He's super into stuff like housing policy and
economic development, and he thought Charlie Bush was a good
city manager. So Brandon voted to keep Charlie and started

(25:03):
campaigning with the Good Governance League. And he told me
he was quote public enemy number one in the eyes
of Swim conservatives. On social media, people called him disloyal,
a flip flopper. Obviously, those that would have supported being
different roles or you know, friends if you want to

(25:24):
call him. Obviously, a lot of those bridges got burned.
It was hard, you know, because he always had Now
you have a target on your back from you know,
those that thought you aligned with their ideology. Attacks like
this took a toll. Brandon told me. There there was
counseling sessions. I want to uh, we'll sure caught that

(25:47):
UM dealing with things like you know, PTSD kind of thing.
Come back to my ractors. There's some strategies learned dealing
with UM that type of thing that worked well with
the anxiety and city council of means. But Brandon felt
strongly about his commitment to public service local government should
not be about political ideology, he told me. It's supposed

(26:11):
to be about setting aside your personal views for the
greater good. But as the November election drew nearer, Brandon's
philosophy seemed to be losing out. In Swim politics. That's
coming up after the break. It was now fall, two

(26:37):
months before election day, and while Good Governance League activists
were working on getting out the vote, things were heating
up in town around vaccine mandates, another big wedge issue
that the city council was about to weigh in on.

(26:58):
One night in early September, as the sun set on Squim,
a group of locals marched to what they thought was
the private residence of the county public Health officer to
protest a new vaccine requirement for indoor dining. They also
stopped outside Mayor Armor Costs hair salon to show their

(27:18):
support for him. When the mayor approached, the crowd cheered
and asked for a word of encouragement. This was posted
in a video on Twitter. Armor cost wore a T
shirt emblazoned with a large gun and the words trump
forty because the forty four didn't work for eight years,

(27:40):
he said. Encouragement here we the people were a lot
stronger than a few individuals. We have constitutional rights. Our
Washington State Constitution and the Constitution of the United States
has been violated. We have worked our butts off as
a council to provide over a half a million dollars
to our small businesses. We created the Rapid Relief Small

(28:02):
Business Fund that was a grant. It was not alone
to help them to keep from going out of business
when we were shut down. Yea, we are not going
to sit idle with this. And then the mayor said
he was working on a solution with his city council.
We are going to have a resolution specifically dealing with
this mandate to keep our business as a float. They

(28:26):
have worked their buns off to try to stay in business.
By the way, this protest wasn't all that successful because
when the group arrived at the address they found for
the county public Health officer, they discovered she no longer
lived there, but they did ask her ex husband, who

(28:47):
answered the door, to deliver their angry message. He responded
by telling them to leave his property. I've reached out
to Mayor armor Cost for comment many times throughout my
month of reporting on SQUIM he's ignored most of my
requests and declined one of them, directing me to speak
to Donnie Hall. Anyways, the resolution the mayor had talked

(29:11):
about came to a vote at City Council less than
two weeks later. Arma Coost introduced it and one of
the other counselors read it out loud. Okay, moving on
to Item eight point four A B two one dash
zero seven six Resolution expressing Support for the rights of
small Businesses and essential Workers. Basically, this resolution was a

(29:36):
statement of support for anyone in Squim who believed their
constitutional rights were being violated by the vaccine requirement for
indoor dining. But really this was a piece of government theater.
Since the city couldn't actually overrule the county's mandate, it
seemed bound to cause confusion, but it passed four three,

(30:00):
with the mayor and his allies voting yes. Remember these
were members who were appointed to the City Council and
who were now candidates up for election. The nose included Brandon,
who basically said he thought the resolution contradicted the rule
of law, and for that Brandon got smeared on social media.

(30:23):
People said that he was quote declaring his disdain for
business owners and for the Constitution. But Brandon doubled down
on his reasoning. In his mind, a resolution to oppose
the county mandate had nothing to do with running squid.
Just listen to what he said a forum sponsored by

(30:44):
the Klallam County League of Women Voters later that month.
We all have films about those hot topic issues, but
they have their their own to area arena to be
dealt with. Were legislated to legislate at this point and
get involved with issues that we can't fix, and forgetting
who we really work for. We've become almost like squabbling siblings. Um.

(31:04):
I really don't think a single mother, you know, working
a full time job but minimum wage, just concerned about
what resolution the council passes. Seeing as the same thing,
Brandon had just laid out a pretty inclusive vision of
who he thought the government is supposed to work for.
It shouldn't be just for a narrow slice of partisans.
He was saying, government is supposed to work for everybody.

(31:28):
That's why the organizers behind the Good Governance League wanted
candidates like Brandon on their slate. The important part was
that he was committed to serving all of Squim and
that he respected the contours of his role on city council.
It didn't matter what his party registration was, and that

(31:49):
has long been an overarching vision for local government, where
neighbors are supposed to work together to get things done.
It's why Swim and many other towns like it made
council positions nonpartisan in the first place. Here's Marsha McGuire,
the ex librarian turned Good Governance League volunteer, talking about Brandon.

(32:12):
I wouldn't say he's anything like a Democrat or a
luckily in or anything like that. Now, he's still very
much Republican when it comes to taxes and that those
kind of things. But we supported them. It was not
a partisan thing. We were not trying to get a
particular ideology. We were trying to bring in a government

(32:32):
that was a city government that was looking at city issues,
not making you know, a national issue out of everything,
and mostly not supporting right wing conspiracy theories. We we
just wanted a same stable government and even get back
to normal where the Republicans, you know, are more of

(32:53):
the Republicans I remember growing up, you know, in the
final weeks before election day, Good Governance due volunteers sprang
into action. A former union organizer led the charge to
canvass the town, sending volunteers door to door to talk
to residents in person about what was at stake. Others

(33:14):
wrote postcards encouraging neighbors to get out and vote. And
then we also put out bi weekly email blasts, you know,
to all our members comparing the candidates who were running.
By the time election day rolled around, Good Governance League
organizers had done what they'd set out to accomplish, and

(33:34):
that was to awaken residents to what was happening in
their local government. Whereas a lot of Squim residents hadn't
previously paid much attention, the Good Governance League had shown
a bright light on the town's leaders. The day before
the election, I called up one of the candidates, Vicky Lowe,
to see how she was doing. I think I'm excited

(33:58):
because I feel like people really want to see that
change and that hopefully will be reflected tomorrow when they
get the final votes. On election night, the Good Governance
League held a watch party on Zoom. Everyone was there
streaming in from their respective homes. Sina, Marcia Brandon, Vicky.

(34:19):
They done everything they could do and now it was
up to the voters. The results started trickling in a
little after eight pm, and guess what, Yeah, good congratulations.

(34:41):
On election day, Good Governance prevailed by a landslide. All
five of the Good Governance League candidates one with more
than sixty of the vote. That meant their entire slate
was going to enter office. That included Vicky Lowe, and
it meant Brandon Genese had been reelected. Here's one of

(35:04):
the Good Governance League board members speaking at the election party.
We're humbled and inspired by the results tonight and proud
of these candidates who stepped up to serve their community.
We can't say love to thank all those who had
imported them to day. I talked to Shena after the election.
She had expected that the Good Governance League would win,
simply because so many people were fed up with the

(35:27):
antics of Mayor Armacost and his allies. But she was
shocked by the margins. She had no idea they'd be
so large. She told me, she thought that the major
factor behind that overwhelming victory came down to the group's
organizing power. Simply put, the Good Governance League had made

(35:49):
sure that their neighbors were paying attention. I think there
was also a large segment of our community that was
unaware of what was going on because they don't pay atten.
Jen and I used to be one of those, so
I know that they exist, and I really believe that
all of the handwritten postcards, the doorbelling, the follow up doorbelling,

(36:11):
the continued conversations on social media, just this significant outreach
that was done. That's the difference the Good Governance League made.
A few months later, Kathleen and I traveled to Squim.
We wanted to see how the town was faring after
the Good Governance League candidates had been sworn into office.

(36:34):
By this point, Arma Coost was still on city council,
but his old allies were gone. Now. Brandon told me
things were going better, more like they were supposed to.
City council members were able to discuss actual policy issues
and solutions to local problems. There were disagreements, for sure,

(36:57):
but there was a sense of respect. He said. We
might have a difference of opinions, but it's not going
to be the same negativity that say it could have
happened um on a prior council. They'll be you know,
I'm sure we'll have some discussion during the councilmanting, but
after that's over and local goal have have a beer

(37:19):
or whatever you want. So by early it seemed like
things had started to calm down. The Matt Clinic was
nearly open to patients, a new city manager had been hired,
and it seemed like he was working pretty well with
staff in the new council. Not everything was perfect save

(37:41):
our Squim and other social media groups were still pretty
lively with racist comments and anti government fervor. But the
most important thing for Squim, Sheina said, was that those
ideas weren't driving the narrative anymore. They had been moved
off center stage because the election had sent a loud message,

(38:06):
she said. But I definitely think that winning by that
margin really drove it home to the people in this
community that think like that that they are in the minority.
So maybe they need to consider either a looking at
themselves in the way that they're thinking, or be maybe

(38:26):
this isn't the right community for them, Maybe they need
to find their community of people where they're in the majority.
I don't know, I sold that's up to them, but
I hope they really understand they're in the minority and
the community is gonna put up with that crap, and
we sure a watch now. In reporting on Squim, I'd
set out to understand what it took for a group

(38:47):
of locals to fight back against the forces of extremism.
And what I found was that it took a village.
It took people like Sina, Brandon, Marcia and Vicky, who
all had different backgrounds and skills, but who were all
united by a shared commitment to democracy, and they put

(39:08):
that commitment into action with the same tools that generations
of organizers have used before. It's not all that new
or complicated or even surprising, but what was eye opening
for people in Swim was how quickly things changed when
they weren't paying attention, and how vulnerable their city government

(39:31):
seemed to be in the current political environment. Could efforts
like the Good Governance League be replicated, Yes, experts told me.
But it's also worth pointing out that the folks and
Swim had a lot of resources to draw on, education, time,
and means, and Squim is a politically purple community, one

(39:55):
that swings back and forth between parties and presidential elections.
The towards radicalism might have been weaker there than other
places like Shasta County. Last we left off Shasta was
on the eve of another high stakes election, one We're
far right candidates were bidding for even more control of

(40:18):
the county, the schools, the election department, the Sheriff's office.
We're voters, They're paying attention. That's next time on Bedrock USA.
This episode was reported and hosted by me Laura Bliss.
Kathleen Quillian is our senior producer. Samantha Story is our

(40:41):
story editor and executive producer. We had additional editing help
from Nicole Flato, original music and scoring by Zachary Walter,
and audio engineering by Blake Naples. Jennifer Sandag is head
of Bloomberg City Lab. Bed Rock USA is a production
of Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio. For more

(41:03):
podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.